Violence In Peacetime

An Air Force brat, I was so used to soldiers marching by our house, I hardly noticed.

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How orderly the mower’s sound,

blades mincing, round and round,

the tender blades of grass.

I hear the boots of soldiers pass

beneath my curtained window,

and don’t wonder where they go.

Dulle Griet (Pieter Bruegel The Elder)

A creature of prentice alchemy,
slack-jawed butcher, zombie,
wrote the last Deuteronomy
in egg on the first door to Hell.
In breastplate and iron cap (bell
in a tree-tin and distant knell),
Meg schemed the death God would flee
from hated lizards' bite and miss
the jaws of soldier-swigging fish,
but not her blood-sword avarice.
The sick crone ran, her dream to marry
hot in pots and pans she'd carry.

"He is a spy,
a bloodlust fly
circling the sty
above the sky,"

she said as the egg ashes fell
on all red, fecund infidels.
Her barrel insect monster's hiss
excited her waistless bogey-
man's ass to speak; it said, "I
eat and fart and then I die!"
The hysterical diablerie
on the witch inflicted flies.
God's dancing pipers' fantasy,
with spiders from a harp to kill
those who eat apples but can't piss
a lake in payment of the toll,
blow them long and bloody kisses.
His winking, trapdoor-blinkered eyes,
opened wide as windows, see
Mad Meg charge; she desperately
desires to confound her enemy.

Lighght

A beam of light cutting the skin of space

travels at the speed of time to the beginning,

the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere

lined with silver, instantaneously covering

all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,

a point on a continuum proliferating one day

to saturate the universe with something better

than gas, heat, matter. 

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor

at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter 

shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.

It stretches across the sky like an eyelid

and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,

blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white; 

it is nothing at all—

until it strikes something.

With a bow to Aram Saroyan, who wrote the title in 1965.

Now, A Sonnet

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,
But not so many times we can afford 
To hustle past. Let's promise each other --
Never commit the sin of being bored.
Besides, so much has changed in just a year.
The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.
The pattern of the leaves left in the trees
(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),
Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,
Things we think but never think to say.
The colors play the least part of the scene,
And we must grant each leaf its final bow.
If we could stay to watch the last careen
To the ground, we might settle then at Now.

Allegory, Sonnet #621

Notice with what swift skill 

the wave dives on its side 

to escape the rolling mill 

of the incoming tide. 

Sloped beaches elide 

the surf’s distended plight 

to the sandpiper’s delight. 

When the oceans deepen 

and our shores sink from sight, 

when powerful tides bend 

toward dry land and kill 

what no man could defend, 

we’ll call that an evil 

and pray, “Moon, make an end.”

Our Winter

Mid-January and winter has arrived at last.

The branches droop beneath the snow of two

storms.  No bird has sung for us in weeks.

I have read of winters so cold, so long,

the birds fell like leaves from the trees;

always war is raging nearby or the smoke

of the crematorium has smeared the snow like

a gray, vague and indecipherable rubbing.

No bird in my backyard falls from a branch

that doesn’t catch the air beneath its wings

and swoop off into the wind with a kind of

triumph.  I have never been shot at either.

And yet, not forty miles from here a man

was dismembered and his body parts used

in a ritual with no better purpose than

the resurrection of some long dead devil.

In the next county, a girl of sixteen was

hog-tied and set on fire by two brothers

who confessed she had teased them with her

body.  One brother accused the other

of dancing to the rhythm of her screams.

And so, each day, I watch the birds.  This

morning, a cardinal sat hunched on a limb—

as if I’d mistake him for a bloody fist.

Ephemera

How many evenings in ten years;

Most spent — reading aloud, listening —

Trying to be conscious of their joy?

Today one child is still only ten.

The other is only, still only five.

Time disappears into their growing.

Sometimes you think that even

To be conscious is not enough —

Then you despair, like a castaway,

Fingers cupped on the sea’s edge,

Afraid to sip when it is the whole sea

You are dying, dying to drink.